Ably Documentation Overview

Ably is a hugely scalable, superfast and secure hosted realtime messaging service for web-enabled devices.

This Git repository contains most of the Ably API documentation that resides at https://www.ably.io/documentation in Textile format. Nanoc is used to build the static site from the master branch.

The Ably documentation was intentionally created as a public repository using a simple text based markup language so that:

It can be maintained by Ably staff and developers.
3rd parties can fork the repository, and submit pull requests to improve the documentation. We welcome the community's suggestions and input.
This documentation is later merged upstream to the Ably primary website documentation with each website release.

Viewing the documentation

The static site generated from this documentation repository is hosted at http://docs.ably.io and deployed automatically when the master branch is updated. We frequently publish updates from this repository so is typically more up to date than the official Ably API documentation.

The official complete Ably documentation that incoporates all the documentation in this repository can be found at https://www.ably.io/documentation

Forking and running locally

Fork the repository at https://github.com/ably/docs
Clone a local version of your forked repo git clone https://github.com/[you]/docs and cd into it
Checkout the master branch: git checkout master
Create your feature or fix branch and check it out: git checkout -b [your-branch]
bundle install to install the necessary gems
Create a jsbin config file: cp config/jsbin_config.example.yaml config/jsbin_config.yaml

At this point you can either run the repo directly on your machine or via Docker.

If you have Ruby and are comfortable working in a Ruby environment as follows:

nanoc compile to generate the site for the first time
nanoc view -p 4000 to start up a web server at http://localhost:4000
bundle exec guard to watch for changes and rebuild the site automatically. This is normally run in conjunction with the .nanoc view -p 4000 command so that you can see changes immediately

If you would prefer to use Docker, then you can set up the env as follows:

./docker-run build to build the initial Docker image
./docker-run compile to compile the HTML for the static site (this is a once off command)
./docker-run server to start up a web server at http://localhost:4000
./docker-run guard to watch for changes and rebuild the site automatically. This is normally run in conjunction with the ./docker-run server command so that you can see changes immediately

Running on Heroku

This repo will automatically run on Heroku, but relies on the following buildpacks (see https://github.com/ably-forks/heroku-buildpack-nanoc):

$ heroku buildpacks
=== ably-docs Buildpack URLs
1. https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby
2. https://github.com/ably-forks/heroku-buildpack-nanoc
3. https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-static

Pull requests

Assuming you have followed the steps above, prior to making a PR, make your changes locally and they should be visible within seconds in the browser following a refresh (if using the guard command, else a manual compile is required). If the changes are not visible, check your console where guard is running for errors.
Commit your changes, push your branch and send us a pull request
All pull requests will automatically launch a static review site that will be linked to at the bottom of the PR

Help and contact